


This Cup of Hot Chocolate Does Not Exist

by communistkasen (bagoum)



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29396649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagoum/pseuds/communistkasen
Summary: I read Umineko last week
Relationships: Ibaraki Kasen/Yakumo Yukari
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	This Cup of Hot Chocolate Does Not Exist

"Marisa, you really ought not to come here. You only ran into my pet tiger, and you nearly lost your arm. Next time, you might lose a lot more."

"Damn, ya got scarier pets than tigers?"

"Much scarier."

I guided Marisa through the labyrinthine paths of my dojo, towards the first aid room stashed away in a far corner. --Though, even if I call it labyrinthine, I understand its layout perfectly, and Yukari understands its layout perfectly, so there's no need to change it. So I walked, and she followed, through the unnecessarily obtuse angles and turns of this maze, which houses zero minotaurs but at least one dragon.

Over a thousand years of monasticism I have learned to make my breath, my heartbeat, and my steps alike all perfectly rhythmic. Even my feet shuffle along perfectly parallel lines, and they would not cross no matter for how many eons I walked. Marisa, though, pattered about randomly, running from door to door, her boots crashing against the ground with the grace of a newborn calf and the irregularity of the patterning of flower petals. "That's ama-ze-ing, da★ze. Jus' what I expect of-- Oh!" I heard Marisa stepping into one of the doors-- this one was a study, one of forty-two in the dojo. "It's Yukari! What ya doin' here, Yukari?"

From within responded an inattentive murmur. "Give me a minute, Teacher. I'm almost done."

Struck by a sudden pang of terror, I rushed into the room. I shouldn't have let these two meet. "Yukari! What are you--"

Upon hearing my voice by Marisa's, her brow furrowed, her eyes shot open, and she snapped her head upwards to look at us. She's forged herself a public persona of mystery and power-- but here, reading scrolls with bloodshot eyes in this dimly lit room, she just looks like a bookworm staying up past her bedtime. "Oh, Marisa? Sorry, I was too engrossed in this book. I thought you were someone else."

"Ya thought I was Teacher? Who's that?"

I have no doubt that even Marisa, if she took a few moments to reflect on this situation, would figure out that _I_ am "Teacher"-- but her habit of asking questions before she understands the problem might give us an easier way out of this situation. Yukari, realizing this, shot me a familiar glance, requesting aid. It would be difficult if she were to name someone and then Marisa were to go talk to that person, so the best way to diffuse this situation is to avoid lying at all via a simple redirection trick, and I'm uniquely in the position to do that.

"Marisa, there is nobody in this world who is an expert at everything. So even someone like Yukari spends time learning from other people. And some of those people are wise enough that she calls them Teacher." Though it's about time she got rid of that habit. I haven't taught her in well over a millennium. Actually, I've never taught her anything.

"Fair 'nuff. So, Yukari, what ya doin' here?"

Obviously, she's reading a book while slacking around in my house. Unsure as to how to dress up something so visible, Yukari barely managed to stammer out, "I'm here for a, uh, political meeting between youkai and... uh..."

"And I represent the humans as well as the hermits."

With my assist, Yukari's eyes brightened, and I could immediately tell that she had already figured out the end of this discussion. "Yes, that's right. I meet regularly with representatives of various interest groups in Gensoukyou. And we plan out all the incidents in advance. We have one drawn up for next week, so don't slack off."

If Marisa had not started speaking before Yukari had even finished, she would surely have fallen for the bait. But, as they say, you can't strategize against someone who doesn't know what they're doing. "Yer dressed awful casual for a political meeting, ain't ya? Ne'er been to one, but I gotta doubt they hand out blankets and slippers there, ze. And-- hey, s'that hot chocolate?"

Yukari sighed. This was the most difficult of the several branching paths of this discussion. "They don't hand out blankets or hot chocolate. But as I'm apparently the only person in Gensoukyou who arrives on time to meetings, I've gotten into the habit of making myself at home while waiting. Well, all of Gensoukyou is my home, so this is a right owed to me, in a way."

"Yeah, I've seen ye do it to Reimu too, ze... but ya know, I ain't ever hear'a one of these meetings. Why don't ya invite me'r Reimu once?"

"Everyone knows that these kinds of meetings happen, but you're not allowed to discuss them in public. To maintain the illusion of freedom." She turned to me, and her flat mouth extended into a cruel smile. "Marisa sounds like someone who would needlessly blather about these sorts of things, don't you think, Kasen? For the sake of confidentiality I'd like to kill her right here to keep her silent, but she's _nominally_ under your jurisdiction, so I'd _prefer_ to get permission first." She drawled out these two qualifications, unwilling to concede authority in even the fictional version of Gensoukyou she had just cooked up.

Marisa jumped, her hands flying backwards as if Yukari's words had carried on them a powerful gust. Well, she's right to jump. Even if Yukari's words aren't serious, they're scary precisely they _could_ be serious. "Wait, wait! Ya can't just kill me like that, ze! That's murder da★ze!" ...Didn't she tell me off about that once?

Yukari threw her head back with a flourish and laughed, cruelly, controlledly, though to me it looked a lot less impressive in the context of her pajamas and oversized reading glasses. "And? Who has the right to prosecute me, the God of Gensoukyou? This realm is my sandbox; I create and destroy its fragments as I wish. Have you ever considered that the only reason your dear Hakurei Shrine yet stands is because I was the one who planted its wooden stakes in the ground? Or that the only reason the human village is so safe is because I have whispered in all the youkai's ears to respect it as their own home? Or that the only reason this realm exists at all is because my power separates it from the Outside? In this world, whatever I do is correct. That is the privilege given to God. You may deny me, but unlike the pathetic wandering ghosts of this land who call themselves gods, I have no need for your belief, your work, or your gifts. You owe your life and soul to me. Accept it or deny it, I care not. But if you deny it, you may end up losing them both." Without a moment's pause, she turned her gaze back to her book-- or rather, it was my book-- and, pushing back up her glasses, continued reading, as if the two of us weren't even there. When her hand lifted from it to turn a page, I caught a glimpse of the cover. She was reading-- theology. No wonder. Only an atheist holding a theology tract could say something so profane.

Marisa was at this point quivering uncontrollably, so I softly placed a hand on her shoulder and spoke softly. "Don't worry. She says a lot, but as long as you live a just life, she won't hurt you. Just forget you ever saw her here, and that'll be best."

"Y-yeah, ze..."

I escorted Marisa out of the study and into the first-aid room, then saw her off. She was uncharacteristically quiet for that leg of her visit. After I'd confirmed her departure, I returned to the study where Yukari was reading and sat down on the other end of the table.

"So? Did you make hot chocolate for me too?"

A slight giggle escaped her throat. She was planning something. As always. "Would you like to make it a game of semantics? Did or did not Yukari prepare hot chocolate for Kasen? Which of us can prove it one way or another?"

Good, good. This is how it ought to be. "Why not? Let's start. Maybe lounging around in my house will have given you some good ideas."

She hadn't yet looked up from the book. "Didn't you hear me, Kasen? This is my house too. I'd even go so far as to say _I'm_ the owner and you're the guest. Though if you say that you only have one of, say, a bed, I'd be willing to share."

"Oh, I'm sure there's a second one somewhere around here. Would you like to go looking for it?" ...This might be a bit excessive as a taunt. Yukari is so habitually dishonest about everything that I could probably stand to be a bit more understanding when she did manage to get some of her actual feelings out.

But in response to this, her expression was only lit up even further by amusement. "Look? Didn't you have several guest rooms here? I was never able to find them after my first visit, though. What ever happened to them?"

Satisfied that my worry was at least slightly misplaced, I smiled, as lightly as I could. "You caught me. I figured that your presence here does not require any guest rooms, and also requires that there are no guest rooms. Think about that for a bit. The first part is simple enough, but in addition, if you're here, I _cannot_ have guest rooms. So I got rid of them."

"It's a good little riddle. I'll solve it later. So, for our game, you can play white, but let me just say that I have mate in one."

"...White?"

For a moment she looked troubled, but her amused expression returned just as quickly. "...You can go first, but I'm warning you that no matter what you do, I win on my next turn."

Had she rigged the game already? Impossible. At the outset, this game is perfectly fair: we each have one decision of two choices, and neither decision is affected by the other, and there is a 50% chance of victory for any strategy. "...Really? How do you figure that?"

"Well, think of it like this. If you conclude that I did not make you hot chocolate, but I in fact did, and by some mysterious and unknown mechanism hid it away, then I show you the hot chocolate and I win. There are three more situations: you conclude that I did not make it and I did not; you conclude that I did make it and I did; you conclude that I did make it and I did not. In these three situations, all I have to do is disappear with a taunting smile and say that you're wrong, regardless of the truth. Because the revelation of the truth is up to me, I can simply withhold the truth and make that my victory."

"In a fair game, we would each have two winning situations, but if your interpretation of the game is correct, then you have four winning situations and I zero." I rubbed my eyes with the tips of my finger, groaning. "Aah... to think my student would end up as a habitual cheater! Where did I go wrong in my instruction?" --Probably the part where I never gave her any instruction in the first place.

Her eyes yet gazed down at the lines of text covering the pages of her-- my-- book, but her vaguely threatening smile faced me. "It's not your fault, Teacher. Cheating requires power. When I was with you, I had no such power for you to show me how to use properly."

"Not necessarily, Yukari. You can cheat with words as well. Let me show you." The core of rhetoric is, arguably, cheating. The goal of a debate is not to prove your point, but to abuse logic and double meanings in a way that locks your opponent into an inescapable bind. I would always pose absurd logic puzzles to her, so maybe I should have expected her to learn how to stack decks more literally like this... So here, let me abuse logic to change the rules of the game. "Of course, in the first situation, where I claim that you did not make me hot chocolate but you in fact did, I lose. There's no helping that. If you show me the hot chocolate that I claim does not exist, I can't do anything. However, I claim that the other three situations are in fact _my_ victory."

She glanced at a corner of one of the pages, then slapped the book shut with a soft thud and placed it face-down on the table. Planting her elbows on the table and leaning forward on them, she smiled again, much more broadly this time, and pointed her gaze at me. "Let's hear it."

"If I claim that you did not make it and you did not, and then you disappear with a taunting smile, then the situation is that I cannot prove that you did not make it, and you cannot prove that you made it. However, in that situation, the fact that you disappear instead of simply pulling out your proof can be taken as circumstantial evidence that the proof does not exist. So, while I cannot prove that you did not make it, the evidence for my case is stronger."

She shrugged, unimpressed by my first offense. "Fair. Though I was already prepared to concede that one."

"On the other hand, if I claim that you did make it, then whether you made it or not, you will disappear with a taunting smile. Since both truths will equally contribute to this outcome, from a Bayesian perspective, that outcome gives me no information or evidence."

She clasped her hands together, smiling wickedly, satisfied with these final two walls she had put up. "Yes, and in that case, my word, however untrustworthy, would decide the game. And I will disappear with a taunting smile, and you will lose."

I clicked my tongue, as if to chide her for a logical error. "No, no, Yukari. You haven't been reading enough theology. Because this situation gives me the opportunity to use a very contorted reasoning technique only accepted by theologians. _I assert that you prepared hot chocolate, and the burden of proof is on you to show that you did not._ " I grinned, and for the fun of it, threw in a mild provocation. "You know, Yukari, over your taunting smile, I prefer the face you make when you lose a game."

Her expression contorted with confusion, and her face flashed red as she attempted to ignore my last proclamation. "N-no, wait, you can't do that. The burden of proof is on the one who makes the claim. You are making the claim and I am playing devil's advocate, so you are the one who must prove it. Yes, yes, you must prove it, and that is why I will win this game."

" _You must prove it_ \-- that's certainly what a scientist would say. But let me show you what a theologian would say... My understanding of the world encompasses yours, so there are some proofs that convince me but are faulty to you, but all proofs that are valid for you are also valid for me. My proof that the hot chocolate exists is one of the former. Since it is faulty to you, there is no need for me to say it. However, to match my proof in this game, you yourself must provide a proof that the hot chocolate does not exist. And, since any proof that is valid for you is valid for me, you must say it. The victor is then decided by the validity of your proof alone."

Dumbstruck by the brazen audacity of my absurdly wrong argument, she only stared at me. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, she began speaking-- probably to herself. "No, no. That doesn't make any sense... There must be a contradiction... Yes, it must be a converse fallacy somewhere..." She went silent, and her eyes focused on an empty point in space. She's right that there is a contradiction in what I've said, but her intuition is wrong to expect a converse fallacy. The fault is actually in the naïve phrasing of _encompass_. I implied that the axioms of reasoning that form my understanding are a superset of the axioms of reasoning that form her understanding. While it is perfectly valid to add new axioms to a system, the risk you run is that you may make the system contradict itself, or make it inapplicable to situations that the system could previously handle. For example, consider the laws of geometry. The first four laws of geometry are _absolute_ , in that they are common to every system of geometry we know of. The fifth law, stating that parallel lines never touch, is not. When you add the fifth law, you become unable to reason about many different geometries that do in fact exist in the real world-- like the surface of this planet. Two lines, starting at the equator and moving downwards, are parallel and yet meet at the South Pole. They form a triangle with angles that sum to more than 180 degrees. The fifth law says it is impossible, but it is undoubtedly real. For my argument to be correct, I must show that the axioms unique to my system do not interfere with the axioms we share, and given that this claim about axioms is entirely hypothetical, that'd be impossible for me to do.

This said, I can't give her too long to figure that out. It's time to move to the next stage and claim my victory. "But, even if I have only three out of four winning situations, my chance of victory is 100% if I play optimally."

She racked her brain one last time, then gave up with a sigh. "You're right. If you say _Yukari made hot chocolate for Kasen_ , then, given your sophistry just now, no matter what I do, you win. I can provide some evidence to suggest that I didn't prepare hot chocolate, but I can't prove it, because it's impossible to prove such a negative. And therefore, even though you don't actually have a proof, you can simply assert that you do, and it becomes a stronger proof than mine... This is why I'm an atheist. Or rather, it's why you're an atheist."

"More or less. Then, now that our little pre-game chat is over, I'll make the first move."

She sighed again. "You know, I was planning to pull something along the lines of _admitting_ , in red, that I had prepared a cup for you. Then I could get to see _your_ confused face. Speak falsehood and be cut down by truth, or speak truth and be cut down by falsehood? Like that paragon of dishonesty, the surprise execution problem. _You will be executed tomorrow, and it will be a surprise_. I'll just have to cheat even more next time to get a chance to pull it off."

I hadn't expected her to have planned that far ahead. In that respect, she's a lot more meticulous than I am. "Oh? You can formulate the surprise execution problem with only one day? I thought you needed at least two."

She waved her hand dismissively, apparently disappointed that she couldn't make this explanation after having made use of her trick. "Depends on your solution. I was thinking of it along the lines of unstable knowledge. _If you think you will be executed, then it is not a surprise, and therefore you will not be executed. If you think you will not be executed, then it is a surprise, and therefore you will be executed._ If you analyze it like this, then one day is the simplest form. You could say I've based my entire public persona around the one-day surprise execution problem."

It's an interesting play, but it's weaker than the gambit I'm about to pull. "Huh, you'll need to make a game of semantics out of it sometime. Anyways, here's my opening move. I claim that Yukari _did not_ make hot chocolate for Kasen."

Yukari recoiled, utterly perplexed. Her reading glasses slid, barely holding onto the tip of her nose. She flicked her wrist and a small gap opened above the table, from which a cup of hot chocolate slid out. "Blunder. Two-- no, three question marks. What are you doing, Kasen?"

I couldn't hold in my laughter anymore, and I felt it explode from the depths of my stomach. Yukari would often say that my laughter sounded like the trumpeting of an elephant, and while I would take this as an insult from anyone else, she would always say it with starry admiration in her eyes. And that's why I still laugh like this, even if until today she still hasn't explained the reference.

It took me a few moments to calm down, and then I finally revealed my hand. "You seem to be mistaken about something, Yukari. My goal wasn't to win the game. It was to drink the hot chocolate you prepared for me."

She turned her reddening face away, and through pouted cheeks, muttered, "That's cheating, Teacher... I can't even prepare it nearly as well as you..."

And here's the coup de grâce. I win this game. "But it tastes so much better imbued with your love, you know."

She covered her face in her hands, and with that cute, embarrassed voice of hers, mumbled, "No, no... a discovered double-check mate... how did I miss it..."

"Don't take it so badly. It's ten thousand years too early for you to beat me in a game of semantics, Yukari. Though I can't say I don't enjoy watching you fail."

She shook for a few moments, then released her hands and turned her head up to face me. Her face was still red, but she made an effort to meet my gaze. "No. This isn't my loss either." She raised an arm and, trembling, pointed a finger at me. "Now that you've done all that flirting, are you just going to sit down and sip at your drink? Finish what you started. That was my goal from the start."

I blinked, and she disappeared from her seat; I blinked again and she appeared in my arms, embracing me tightly. I liked to pull this disappearing trick often, but only she could actually complete the scientifically-impossible second half of reappearing somewhere else. With great effort she craned her head over to my ear and whispered, "Kasen... I'll make you as much hot chocolate as you like afterwards, so let this cup go cold."

It was rare for her to be this direct-- about anything, actually, but even less so about this-- so I couldn't waste her sincerity. I wrapped my arms around her, and, nibbling softly at the neck she had exposed to me, responded in an equally quiet whisper. "It might be frozen by the time I'm done with you."

"Ah..." a small moan escaped her lips, though she suppressed it immediately, as dishonestly as always. "...If it's not, I won't be satisfied."

I rose from my seat, abandoning the hot chocolate to the chilly breeze. Despite her cynical-- one might even say mathematical-- disdain for ceremony and ritual as nonfunctional wastes of time, there are a few she always insists on, among which is this-- me carrying her, bridal style, to the singular bedroom in this house.

Why not make use of her scientifically-impossible teleportation abilities to skip this ceremony altogether? --I know the answer, and though she would certainly refuse to admit it, Yukari certainly knows the answer as well.


End file.
